The Early Inventors

To find a satisfactory element material, Edison was reputed to have tried more than 1600 kinds of materials ( paper and cloth, thread, fish line, fiber, celluloid, boxwood, coconut shells, spruce, hickory, hay, maple shavings, rosewood, soft dry wood rotted by fungal attack (punk), cork, flax, bamboo and incredibly the hair out of a red-headed Scotsman s beard ). Until eventually, Edison hit on the idea of carbonizing a loop of ordinary cotton thread, which glowed in a vacuum for more than half of that eventful day of 21 October, 1879. This filament was later replaced by carbonized Bristol cardboard that burned for 170 hours. The incandescent electric lamp had arrived. 

Edison also took out a UK patent dated 10 November 1879 [5], which preceded, by some 12 months, a UK provisional patent taken out by J.W. Swann [6] for lamp filaments made of carbon. These patents of Edison and Swann are the first recorded UK patents dealing with carbon fiber. In 1889, Hughes and Chambers [7] patented a process to produce carbon filaments from a mixture of methane and hydrogen pyrolyzed in an iron crucible yielding hair-like carbon filaments, but the process was uneconomic. A further improvement 

Edison is seated, wearing cap, and sixth from the left. Note the pipe organ at the back, the focal point for after-hours singing and beer drinking. Those were the days Source. Courtesy of Tom Koba, The Edison Birthplace Museum, Milan, Ohio. 

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There was a steady increase in the number of gas-turbine patents after Barber s disclosure. However, the attempts of the early inventors to reduce them to practice was entirely unsuccessful. 

The early inventors of TOF mass spectrometers provided remarkable insights into the mass resolution problem, with approaches to addressing this aspect of TOF instmments that are pertinent to this day. Developing a focusing method compatible with an electron impact ionization source, they devised an approach using pulsed ion extraction which, when applied after a suitable time delay, would improve mass resolution by compensating for differences in initial kinetic energy. Today, the subnanosecond pulsed lasers used in laser desorption and MALDl provide a more compatible ionization source that has seemed for many years to not require this complex approach. Delayed extraction has of course now been revisited to... 

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